127 Articles:

The Okmulgee County District Attorney is seeking the disqualification of an Okmulgee judge after the judge on four occasions over four years ruled that police officers lied or embellished facts during testimony. The DA’s Motion to Disqualify does not dispute the judge’s rulings, but claims they could represent a bias against law enforcement.

A Tulsa expungment lawyer explains how people convicted of some misdemenaors are immediately eligible to have the conviction removed from public records. Wait times for other expungments were cut from 10 years to five years. The law also allows some people convicted of two non-violent felonies to seek expungment.

Tulsa County court officials have announced jury trials will be suspended for two full months during the summer of 2016. The court cut two jury weeks from the schedule on either side of judge’s regular July summer vacation time after state officials announced a $1.3 billion budget shortfall. Delays in jury trial schedules pose questions about potential speedy trial violations.

A University of Michigan Law School study reveals Tulsa County has one of the highest rates of exoneration for a county its size anywhere in the nation. False allegations, perjury and official misconduct contributed to many of the convictions that were later overturned.

Oklahoma’s texting and driving law includes ambiguities similar to those in an Indiana law a federal court called “largely inefficacious” and “probably wrong. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals said a police officer who sees a driver holding a cell phone has no reasonable basis to suspect the driver is illegally texting and driving.

An Assistant District Attorney’s dramatic reenactment using a doll during a closing arguments was way over the top, even for Oklahoma’s often prosecution-friendly Court of Criminal Appeals.

The court overturned a defendant’s life-without-parole sentence because of the prosecutor’s theatrical behavior. Although it was not published as precedent, the case summarizes standards that my be used to identify prosecutorial misconduct during arguments by attorneys in Oklahoma criminal trials..

Twice in 2016, five-day deadlines to appeal judicial disqualifications will be reduced to one day because of court holidays and rigid Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals opinions. The unreasonably short deadlines result from the court’s refusal to apply it’s own appellate rules to lower criminal courts, a stern refusal to recognize some civil procedure as applicable to all Oklahoma courts and a strained interpretation of Oklahoma law to conclude the legislature mandated rules that are not spelled out in any Oklahoma law.